Five ways to say goodbye to scolding tweets

Twitter is home to many recurrent motifs, but one of the most reliable is the mass finger wag. Unlike the single finger wag, which takes aim at a specific individual or company ("Airline X lost my luggage!" "So tired of @username's whining!"), the mass finger-wag -- let's call it the hand-wag -- tackles an entire category of twitter users, an entire genre of twitter usage, or a swath of the offline population. Tweets like:

Not another Snow Leopard tweet! We've heard enough about your OS upgrade for one night.

Know the people doing your social media marketing - and their methods and ethics

It can happen so quickly: a few misplaced tweets, an ill-considered blog post, and suddenly an organization is at the center of an online firestorm. They're called spammers and liars, and tagged with the Hashtag o' Doom, #FAIL. And the worst thing of all is they had no idea what was happening.

Where, oh where, did it all go so wrong?

Probably somewhere around the moment they decided to outsource their social media marketing.

Just because there's no price tag doesn't make you aren't paying for it

It happened again today. Every time an online service like Twitter or Facebook hits a roadbump, or stops working altogether, there's an outcry of protest from its users. Then, just as quickly, comes the backlash: "How dare you complain about a FREE service?"

When it comes to engagement, social media is the art of the possible

I can't believe it!! Your organization isn't on Twitter? You don't have a Facebook page with discussion groups and a wall? You're not on MySpace, Bebo and FriendFeed?! OMFG, that's so weak! What are you thinking?!

Well, maybe you're thinking, "We don't have a large organization, and we have very few resources." Maybe you're thinking, "Some platforms make it easier to manage conversations than others." And maybe you're thinking, "I'm going to put our limited resources and finite attention where they'll do the most good."